First there was fat shaming, then there was thin shaming, then there was body positivity – or the ‘real women’ movement – now there’s body neutrality. Conversation around the female body never seems to go away, but for many, Kendrick Lamar gave #TheCause a big boost last week with his new video for Humble. In it, he raps, ‘I’m so f*cking sick and tired of the Photoshop... Show me something natural like ass with some stretch marks,’ as a beautiful, bare-faced black woman struts around him, before it cuts to a shot of a gloriously stretch-marked bottom.The internet went mad, applauding their new feminist hero, with many women crying into theTwitter void that ‘at last’ they felt validated and seen.
And it makes me uncomfortable. Because how is this really so different to most other music videos that police women’s bodies? Once again, we have a man telling us what
is and isn’t attractive about a woman. Once again, we’re putting the emphasis on what he thinks of her looks, without giving her any agency. That bum shot everyone went so crazy over? That was a women from behind, with no identity and her top half and face cut out. She is still an object to be scrutinised. We’re still being presented with a woman’s body and asked if we find this acceptable. In fact, most of the imagery in Humble is silent women in bras who are there to be looked at, and men in jumpers doing the looking.
I want to be grateful to Lamar for trying, but then I think about him sitting in a casting room, while half-naked women are paraded in front of him for his judgement – does this one have enough flaws for my video? Does that one look ‘real’ enough? I can’t escape the feeling that there is an exploitation of female insecurity and a commercialisation of our body issues going on here.
I know, I know – ‘Men can’t get anything right!’ – and really, I so want to believe in the sincerity of this. I want us to celebrate our ‘skindividuality’ and I love that the world is having a conversation around stretch marks right now. My breasts look like a badly pieced-together puzzle and I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have them. But I don’t like the feeling that we’re only allowed to celebrate them now because a man gave us permission. I want us to look to ourselves for acceptance of our own skin. Like model Chrissy Teigen, who posted her stretch marks on social media in January with the caption ‘Whatevs’. Or like Ashley Graham, who is single-handedly reclaiming cellulite, writing on Instagram recently, ‘I’m not ashamed of a few lumps, bumps or cellulite.’ Or actor Meghan Markle, who talked last month about her ‘pet peeve’, the photoshopping of her freckles and whitening of her ‘ethnically ambiguous’ skin. Even Kim Kardashian has started speaking more openly about her psoriasis. Because this is what we need more of if we’re going to embrace stuff like stretch marks; women standing up, women having the conversation, women speaking out and saying, ‘I’m fine like this.’
Lucy Vine’s new book, Hot Mess will be published by Orion books 13th July.
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